On the original iPhone the location switch was basically real. Location services burned a ton of battery and law enforcement's ping capability was rudimentary.

On the original iPhone the location switch was basically real. Location services burned a ton of battery and law enforcement's ping capability was rudimentary. Back then turning the switch off made a smartphone as difficult to locate as a dumbphone. The phone had to exert a lot of energy to know where it was even within a city block. I'm not convinced this has changed much. Obviously if the Eye of Sauron chooses to focus on your location there's no way to avoid it but I would bet that mundane cell phone location logs are sharply limited by tower storage, CPU limits, and probably by software licensing. I'd be interested to hear from a cell tower software engineer.